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The Board of Editors is pleased to present Issue 1 of the 2014 Volume of the Illinois Law Review.

First, Professors Osofsky & Wiseman develop a novel theory of energy governance and use it to assess how institutional innovation can help meet critical modern energy challenges. Building from their prior work arguing for a dynamic approach to energy federalism, this Article focuses on the potential of institutions that are “hybrid” by virtue of including public and private actors from several governance levels and enabling important interactions among them.

Next, Professor Weidemaier uses a unique data set of sovereign bonds to explore how international financial contracts responded to the legal and policy initiatives in the United States that abandoned the doctrine of absolute immunity. The Article demonstrates that the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 prompted a major shift in contracting practices despite investors’ continued indifference to legal enforcement and argues that contract theory must recognize that a wider range of forces may prompt boilerplate to change.

Following, Professor Hoffer argues that providing a single test for contract defense cases of misrepresentation and mistake with recourse to punitive damages in cases of fraud would harmonize the defenses with their normative underpinnings and eliminate inefficient redundancies in the common law.

Next, Professor Miller explores the error-cost-based approach to IP statutes, arguing that the time is ripe for more effective interbranch dialogue on IP law, since the America Invents Act of 2011—comprising some of the most significant changes to patent law since the 1952 Patent Act—came fully into force in March 2013.

Further, Professor Shafir describes the results of empirical research done into decision making under conditions of plenty and of scarcity. Among the topics examined in the studies are the impact of easier versus more imposing financial challenges on cognitive capacity, the psychology of borrowing, and the potential impact of financial concerns on other, nonfinancial behaviors.